The Inquirer is pitting a 4 core Xeon against a 8 Core. Now this may seem like a waste of time, as the 8 core will do better than the 4, but it is all a matter of scaling. Can an octuple core perform twice as well? Is it better to split a task between 2 quad core machines?

Or it may be just so they can post a Sandra MultiMedia instruction benchmark of 573,631.

The Tech Report puts the brand new X2 6000+ in direct competition with the E6700. They spend some time focusing on the memory bandwidth, which lets the X2 show up Intel's chip ... for a while. Read on to see how the pure speed of the 6000+ compares to the more modern architecture of the Core 2 Duo chip.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 11, 2007 - Intel Corporation researchers have developed the world's first programmable processor that delivers supercomputer-like performance from a single, 80-core chip not much larger than the size of a finger nail while using less electricity than most of today's home appliances. This is the result of the company's innovative 'Tera-scale computing' research aimed at delivering Teraflop -- or trillions of calculations per second --performance for future PCs and servers.

The Tech Report features a look at the 80 core processor unveiled by Intel at the ISSC. This chip will never hit the stores, but you can bet one of it's descendants will. One of the more interesting features is it's scalability ... if you feed it only 11W it will run at 310 gigaFLOPS which is still well into supercomputer territory. However, if you give it a full meal of 98W it will hit 1.0 teraFLOP, which is definitely something to brag about.